"It is my life; I bring it torn and stained
Out of the battles I have lost and gained;
Once captured, won back from the enemy
At a great loss; yet here I hold it still,
My own to render up as now I do;
I render it up joyfully to you,
Choosing defeat: do with it as you will."
To be out of doors, away from that strange, unreal house of mourning,
brought with it a sensation of almost physical relief.
Lingard walked rapidly along, on his way to the Small Farm. He was
pursued, obsessed, by the horror of the fact. He felt as if he had never
before realised the awful obliteration of death.
Many a mother, wife, sister, kept among the most precious of her
treasures letters signed "Hew Lingard"--letters speaking in high terms
of a dead son, of a dead husband, of a dead brother. But those men and
lads on whose dead faces he had gazed had died the death which to
Lingard and his like puts the crown on a soldier's life. He had lost
comrades who had been dear to him and whose loss he had lamented sorely.
But never, never had the sudden cancelling, so to speak, of a human
being brought with it this sense of chilling horror, of nothingness
where so much had been.
And then there was something else--something which at once revolted and
distressed him inexpressibly. The immediate past, the events of the last
four weeks, became, in so far as they concerned the woman who was now
lying dead, both fantastic and shameful.
Last night, for the first time, something of Athena's ruthless egotism
had forced itself upon Lingard's perception. Hitherto he had been too
deeply concerned with his own egotism, his own cruelty, his own remorse,
to give thought to hers.
That she should have used Jane Oglander as her ambassador to Richard
Maule had shocked, nay more, had disgusted him, as soon as he had found
himself away from the magic of her presence.
Wholly absorbed in the future, Athena, after her first words of eager
gratitude for Jane's intervention, had dismissed Jane from her mind,
expelled her from her mental vision. Nay, she had gone further, for in
answer to a muttered word from Lingard, she had at last said something
which had jarred his taste, as well as roused that instinctive
dog-in-the-manger attitude which slumbers in all men with regard to any
woman who has been beloved.
"Jane," Athena had said impatiently, "will end by marrying Dick Wantele.
But for me she would have done it long ago!" And angrily the listener's
heart, his memory, had given Athena the lie.
After Mrs. Maule had left him the night before, Lingard had gone out of
doors, and now chance brought him to the spot where he had stood for a
long time staring at the long low house which now sheltered Jane
Oglander, driven there, as he knew well, by his base, it now seemed his
inconceivable, cruelty. How clearly he had visualised her last night!
Imagining her as widely awake as he was himself, but denied by a
thousand scruples from the relief of being able to go out, alone, into
the darkness and solitude. If they had met there last night, he might at
least have told Jane of his fight--of his losing fight for his lost
honour. Now she would always believe that he had surrendered without a
struggle.
He walked on and into the curious, formal little garden of the Small
Farm, even now gay with late autumn blossoms. The beams of a wintry sun
lay athwart the picturesque old house.
From the first,--nay, not quite at first, but very soon,--Lingard had
disliked Mabel Digby. He had thought of her as an ally of Dick Wantele,
and at a time when he was still trying to lie to himself as to the
nature of his attraction to Athena, he had often seen her clear brown
eyes fixed on him with a puzzled, troubled expression. Even now he could
not be sorry she was ill. He felt that to-day he could not have faced
those honest, questioning eyes.
Lingard walked up to the porch, and rang the bell. By an odd twist, he
began to think, as he stood there, how it would have been with him had
it been Jane who was lying dead. Clearly he realised that Jane, dead,
would still in a sense have been to him alive. But Athena? Athena was
gone--gone into nothingness. He felt a tremor run through him, a touch
of the old fever....
"Miss Oglander? I think she's upstairs with Miss Digby, sir. But I'll
fetch her down. Will you come into the drawing-room?"
Lingard went through the hall into the long sitting-room which he
remembered, as men remember a place to which they have been in dreams.
Jane had brought him there on the first morning after her arrival at
Rede Place. They had not had a very pleasant walk, for each seemed to
have so curiously little to say to the other, and Lingard, at least, had
hailed with pleasure the moment when they had gone into the house.
He remembered that he had been amused and touched by the many mementoes
of the Indian Mutiny the room contained--quaint coloured prints and
amateurish drawings of Delhi, before and during the great epic struggle,
curious engraved portraits of the various Mutiny veterans under whom
Mabel Digby's father had fought,--signs of a hero-worship the old
soldier had transmitted to his daughter.
He also recalled the feeling of acute irritation with which he had
noticed Mabel Digby's look of shy congratulation at Jane and at himself.
She had been at once too shy and too well-bred to make any allusion to
an engagement which was not yet announced, but there had been no
mistaking her glance, her smile.
How long ago all that seemed! It might have been years--instead of only
weeks.
He went and stood by the fireplace, and then stared up at Outram's
portrait. Was that man, and were that man's comrades and contemporaries,
whose virtues as well as whose courage have become famous as the virtues
and the courage of ancient legendary heroes--were they untouched by the
failings and weaknesses of our poor common humanity? It was certainly
not true of their own immediate predecessors, or--or of their
successors.
* * * * *
A click of the latch--and Jane came into the room. She was pale, but her
manner had regained its old quietude and gentleness.
As she came towards him and saw his ravaged face, a feeling of great
concern, of pity so maternal in texture that it swept away every other
feeling from her heart, almost broke down her new, unnatural composure.
She wished ardently--and Jane was full of hidden fire--to make
everything easy for him. But oh! she could not bear him to look as he
now looked.
It was not in order that Hew Lingard should look, should feel, as he was
now looking and feeling that she had made the great renouncement--the
renouncement which Wantele had implored her with such fierce,
passionate energy to refrain from making. Was it possible that Wantele
had been right, and that she was doing an evil thing by the man she
loved?--such was the agonised question which went through Jane
Oglander's mind as she advanced quietly towards him.
Only a few moments ago she had destroyed Athena's note of wild joy, of
gratitude to herself. As she had watched the paper burn, as she had seen
Athena's delicate, graceful monogram vanish in the flame, Jane had felt
as if her heart was shrivelling up with it.
She had been in the room but a very few moments, and already her
presence was bringing peace to Lingard's seared unhappy soul.
There was nothing on her face to show the conflicting emotions with
which she was being shaken, and to him she breathed renunciation,
serenity. How amazing to remember that only yesterday her nearness had
brought him intolerable unease, as well as keen shame. Now he felt as if
a touch from her hand would cure him of all his shameful ills.
Jane Oglander's pity, and he knew that she was very pitiful, had the
divine quality of raising, instead of debasing, as does so much of the
pity lavished on others in this sad, strange world.
She held out her hand; he felt it fluttering for a moment in his strong
grasp, but alas! it was her unease, her miserable misgiving that she now
bestowed on him. There came over her eyes and brow a look of suffering,
and Lingard dropped her hand quickly. No--he could not tell now, at
once, what he had come to tell her.
"Will you come out with me, Jane?" he asked abruptly.
"Yes. Of course I will." It seemed a long, long time since he had asked
her to do anything--with him.
They went out into the little hall. As he helped her on with her coat,
she made a slight shrinking movement which cut him shrewdly; he reminded
himself that she had the right to hate, as well as to despise, him.
With common consent they turned into the lonely country road, instead of
under the beeches of Rede Place, and as they walked, each kept rather
further from the other than do most people walking side by side. Jane
respected his moody silence, and her memory went back to the first walk
he and she had taken together on the day of his triumphant return home.
It had been a clear starry London night in autumn, and they had crossed
from the shabby, quiet little street where she lived to that portion of
the Embankment which lies between the river and St. Thomas's
Hospital,--a stone-flagged pavement open only to walkers.
There Lingard had linked his arm through hers, and the movement had
given her a delicious thrill of joy, deepening in her that protective
instinct which makes every woman long for the man she loves to cling to
her.
As they had paced up and down, so happily alone in the peopled solitude
London offers to her lovers, Jane's tender heart could not forget what
lay so near, and she had compared her blest lot with that meted out to
the suffering and the forlorn, who lie in their serried ranks in the
wards she so often visited.
How gladly now she would have changed places with the one among them who
was nearest to death.
They were close to the Rectory gate, and Jane suddenly remembered that
Lingard had promised to go in and see Mrs. Kaye this morning. She had
forced herself to ask him to do so, and she remembered now that he had
assented to her wish with almost painful eagerness. Perhaps he thought
she meant him to go there with her. That would explain his coming to the
Farm so early.
"Mr. Maule asked me to come to you," he said at last, breaking the long
oppressive silence. "He thought--God knows why he thought it!--that a
certain terrible thing which has happened--which happened last
night--would reach you best from me."
"Something which happened last night?" Jane repeated in a low voice. "I
know it already. Athena wrote to me."
She turned and faced him steadily.
"Don't look like that, Hew. I--I can't bear it. I know you couldn't
help what's happened. I know you never loved me in the way a man ought
to love a woman whom he is going to marry."
"I did," he said hoarsely. "I swear to God I did!"
She shook her head.
"We both made a mistake," she answered steadily--"and it is fortunate
that we discovered it in time. After all, engagements are often broken
off, and we were engaged such a little--little while. I am glad Mr.
Maule has made up his mind to do what is right."
She flushed for the first time a deep red. The discussion was hateful to
her.
"You are going to the Rectory to see Mrs. Kaye? I won't go in with you,
but I will wait here till you come out; and then we will walk together
to Rede Place. I am going away to-day, back to London, and I can't go
away without saying good-bye to them. I promised Athena I would come for
a few moments----"
The emotion she was restraining, the tears she kept from falling,
stained her face with faint patches of red, and thickened her eyelids.
The measure of beauty which was hers, that beauty which owed so much to
her ever-varying expression, was wholly obscured to-day.
Lingard felt intolerably moved. It was horrible to him to feel that he
had bartered the right, the right he had owned for so short a time and
had yielded so lightly, of taking Jane into his arms, and yet he felt
he had never loved her as he loved her now, defenceless, before him. He
could not wound and shock her by telling her of the terrible thing which
had happened. Mr. Maule had asked too much of him.
His mind turned with relief to the task Jane had set him to do. In this
matter of comforting the mother of a dead soldier son he would be able
surely to bear himself in the old way.
He opened the Rectory gate and walked up, alone, the winding path which
led to the front door.
Yes--Kaye was the name of the poor young fellow who had died at Aden.
What were his disagreeable associations with the name of Bayworth Kaye?
He remembered.
For the first time since the doctor had told Lingard of what had
happened the night before, it seemed as if Athena, her actual physical
presence, was close to him again. He could almost hear the sound of her
melodious voice as it had sounded when, thrilling with anger and scorn,
she had told him of the gossip there had been about herself and this
very man, this young Kaye, whose subsequent death seemed to arouse so
much pity and concern in the neighbourhood.
* * * * *
Mrs. Kaye had been watching and waiting for General Lingard since ten
o'clock. She had spent the hour in her shabby drawing-room going and
coming from one window to the other, a tall, gaunt figure, clad in the
deepest black.
When she saw him walking through the garden she retreated far back into
the room, and there came into her face a look of fierce relief. She had
so greatly feared that Mrs. Maule would prevent the fulfilment of his
promise.
She was, as we know, a woman who made plans, and who carried out her
plans to a successful issue. The rector, in his own way as bereaved, as
heartbroken as was his wife, was in his study. She had told him curtly
that he must stay there until she came and fetched him.
The cook had been sent into the market town four miles away, and the
village girl, who was being trained with a kind of hard efficient care
into a parlourmaid, had received her instructions.
General Lingard was to be shown straight into the drawing-room on his
arrival; and then the girl was to start immediately on an errand to the
village.
There was to be no eavesdropper at the interview Mrs. Kaye intended to
have with the great soldier who was coming to offer his condolences on
the death of her only son.
Strange rumours had reached the rectory, or rather Mrs. Kaye, for the
rector had known nothing of them--rumours which she had drunk in with
cruel avidity, rumours of General Lingard's extraordinary absorption in
his beautiful hostess, of the long walks and drives they took together,
of the many hours they spent alone in her sitting-room.
As yet, however, not even village gossip had linked together the names
of Lingard and Jane Oglander. That secret had been well kept, as are
most innocent secrets.
At last the young servant announced, in a nervous, fluttered voice,
"General Lingard, please, ma'am."
As Lingard walked in, as he saw the figure in deep mourning, his face
relaxed and softened.
He himself came of clerical stock. His grandfather had been one of the
Golden Canons of Durham, and as a child, as a youth, he had lived much
in the more prosperous section of the Church of England. Often in the
holidays he had accompanied relations on calls to rectories and
vicarages which were as poverty-stricken, as full of self-respecting
economy, as was this house. In those days all Lingard's instinct had
stood up in rebellion against the clerical atmosphere in which he was
being bred. But with years there came across him a queer feeling of
loyalty to the cloth, to what had been his father's cloth.
Poor young Kaye! And yet most fortunate young Kaye. Such was Lingard's
involuntary thought as he glanced round the homely room--for the lad
whose mother stood there mourning him had known that a devoted father
and mother watched with solicitude, with pride, with anxiety, every step
of his career.
How different from Lingard's own case!--deprived of his parents in
babyhood, and with none to care whether he did well in his profession or
whether he went to the devil--as he had so very nearly gone to the devil
some twenty years ago.
As he shook hands with the grey-haired woman who stood there with so
tragic, so oppressed, a look on her face, there came across him the
thought of his own long dead mother, and for a moment he was freed of
the terrible happenings of the last few hours.
With an effort he set himself to remember all that he had heard to
Bayworth Kaye's credit. Those who had mentioned him had nearly all of
them alluded to his reckless bravery, to his indifference to physical
danger, to his Victoria Cross....
Ah! it was easy to utter a eulogy of such a son when speaking to the
bereaved mother. It was so strange, so tragic, too, that he should have
died in the way he had died, of fever. Lingard remembered hearing of the
alternate hours of anxiety, of hope, and lastly of despair, through
which the unfortunate parents had passed between the time they had first
heard of their son's illness and of his lonely death.
Mrs. Kaye listened to the kind, heartfelt words of condolence, of
respectful pity for herself and for her husband, in silence; and the
eyes which she kept fixed on Lingard's face were tearless and very
bright. Lingard, moving a little uneasily under their fixed scrutiny,
asked himself whether she really heard and understood what he was
saying? So far, she had not asked him to sit down.
He remembered a long interview of this kind he had had with another
mother. That poor lady had received him surrounded by mementoes of a son
who had been a trusty and sure comrade to himself. He recalled the
photographs which had been brought out for his inspection, the floods of
tears which had punctuated each of his words. But Mrs. Kaye was far more
truly stricken than that other mother had been--Mrs. Kaye required no
photograph of her son to remind her of his face. She had not yet been
granted the relief of tears. Hers was evidently grief of a terrible, a
passionate intensity.
"It is good of you to say these things to me, General Lingard--and to
spare the time to come and see me," she said at last. "But I should not
have troubled you--I should not have presumed to trouble you, were it
not that I wish to consult you about what is to me a very important
matter."
He bowed his head gravely, and sat down in the shabby armchair to which
she rather imperiously motioned him.
"I am entirely at your service," he said quietly. No doubt she wanted
some message transmitted to the War Office.
"I have no one else to ask or to consult," she said in low, rapid tones.
"It is not a matter about which I desire to trouble my husband, and I am
glad to think that he knows, as yet, nothing of what I am going to say
to you. Whether he has to learn it or not will depend, General Lingard,
on your advice."
Lingard looked at her attentively. He was puzzled and rather disturbed
by her words.
"When they told my son he was not likely to live," she said, "he
persuaded the doctor to allow him to write a letter to me, his mother."
She stopped a moment, then went on steadily: "In it he made a certain
request. It is about that request I wish to consult you, General
Lingard. I wish to know whether you consider that I ought to be bound by
his wishes. My son desired that his Victoria Cross and one or two other
things which he greatly valued, and which we, his parents, naturally
value even more than he valued them, should be handed over, given by us
to--to a lady."
Lingard felt a sudden feeling of recoil from the woman who sat opposite
to him, watching for his answer. Then it was jealousy, pathetic but
rather ignoble jealousy, that was making poor Mrs. Kaye look as she
looked now--jealousy rather than grief....
There came the sound of a motor-car in the road which was above the
level of the rectory garden.
It stopped, and Lingard saw through the window Wantele jump out and
cross over to where Jane Oglander was walking up and down.
They spoke together for some moments, and Lingard felt a great
lightening of his heart. Wantele must be telling Jane the awful thing
which had happened, and he, Lingard, would be spared the dreadful task.
Jane came up close to the car. Lingard could not see the expression on
her face. At last, or so it seemed to him, they both got in under the
hood.
So Jane, breaking her promise to wait for him, had gone on to the house?
Making a determined effort over himself, Lingard forced himself to
return to the matter--the painful, the rather absurd matter--in hand.
"I suppose you know all the circumstances," he began awkwardly.
"The circumstances, General Lingard, are perfectly simple." The fingers
of Mrs. Kaye's thin right hand plucked nervously at the buttons which
fastened her black woollen bodice. "The lady in question is a married
woman. She got hold of my boy, and she bewitched him into forgetting the
meaning of what I thought he valued more than life itself--his honour."
She rose up and stared down at Lingard, and there was a terrible look on
her face.
"Having amused herself for the best part of a year--having got from him
all she wanted--she threw my son aside like a squeezed orange. His heart
was broken, General Lingard. I cannot doubt he allowed himself to die.
And it is to this woman that he desires I should give all that he has
left me to remember him by----"
Lingard had also risen to his feet.
"You are bringing a very serious accusation," he said coldly, "against a
lady for whom, as you yourself admit, Mrs. Kaye, your son entertained a
great regard. Young men--forgive me for reminding you of what you must
know as well as I--sometimes form strange, secret attachments which are,
believe me, often as entirely unprovoked as--as--they are unrequited. I
have known more than one such instance."
She drew from her breast a piece of paper.
"I ask you, nay, after what you have just said I implore you, to read
what is written here----"
She almost thrust it into his reluctant hand.
"I don't wish to trouble you with my private concerns, but read
this--read these lines," her shaking finger drew his troubled eyes to
the words: "Do not be hurt, mother. You've never understood. In the
sight of God Athena is my wife. She was nothing--she was never anything,
to that wretched, cruel old man whose name she bears--and to whom she is
so good when he allows her to be."
Lingard read the words over twice very deliberately. Then he folded the
letter, and handed it back to its owner.
"This letter," he said firmly, "should be destroyed. I am sorry you
showed it me, Mrs. Kaye. It was meant for no eyes but yours."
"Ah!" she cried, and tears at last welled up into her eyes. "You blame
my poor boy! But he told me nothing I did not already know----"
She went to the fire and, stooping down, held the piece of paper over
the tongues of shooting flame till he thought her hand must surely be
scorched.
She turned on him. "There! It's gone!" she exclaimed. "No one but you,
General Lingard, and I, his mother, will ever know that my son wrote
that letter. Perhaps I was wrong to have shown it to you. But what you
said--but what you said"--she gave a hard, short sob--"hurt me, made me
angry. I did not know how else to make you understand. And now, if you
say I ought to do what my son asks, I will abide by your decision."
"In your place," he said quietly, "I should certainly carry out your
son's wishes."
But as the mother looked into Lingard's fiercely set face, she told
herself, with sombre triumph, that her boy was avenged.
At the door he turned and faced her.
"I cannot help wondering," he said in measured tones, "whether you have
heard what has happened at Rede Place? Mrs. Maule took an overdose of
chloral last night. She was found dead this morning."
Mrs. Kaye was for a moment utterly astounded by the news. Then, quickly
gathering herself together, she said in a low dry tone, "I will ask you
to believe, General Lingard, that I was ignorant of this--this judgment
when I spoke to you just now."
Lingard made no answer; he looked all round him like a man who seeks
some way of escape.
Suddenly there came into his view the figure of Jane Oglander, moving
patiently up and down on the road beyond the gate.
So she had waited for him....
* * * * *
As Mrs. Kaye went down the passage leading to her husband's study, she
murmured once or twice, "Vengeance is mine!" It was a comfortable
thought that she was alone in the house. She did not consider her
husband anyone. "Vengeance is mine!" she repeated the words in a louder
tone. And then she went into the rector's study and very quietly told
him what she had just heard.
Mr. Kaye was truly shocked and grieved. He had always liked Athena. She
had always been quite civil to him, and so kind, so remarkably kind, to
his dear dead son.
He got up and began looking for his hat. He hoped his wife would not
interfere, and prevent his doing what he thought right. It was surely
his place, as the clergyman of the parish, to go up to Rede Place and
offer his sincere condolences to the bereaved husband.